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A Nordic Orienteering Tour with three new race formats will feature in the 2010 World Cup programme, which also includes the World Championships Finals in Norway, the European Championships in Bulgaria and a final round on the French-Swiss border, culminating in the well established and popular PostFinance Sprint in Geneva. There will be 12 races in all.

European Championships in Bulgaria

The Sprint, Middle and Long distance Finals of the European Championships are Events 1-3 of this year’s World Cup. The venue for the Championships is Primorsko, a Black Sea holiday resort in South East Bulgaria, with the first race being held on 30th May. The full week’s programme includes qualification races for each format and also a European Championships relay.

Innovative Nordic Tour

A new innovation, the Nordic Orienteering Tour with three competitions, forms the second group of World Cup events and takes place in mid-June. The Tour starts in Tuusula, north of Helsinki, Finland with a race having both Middle distance and Sprint characteristics. During this race there will be a map change at the arena with a change of scale and map standard.

The second day of racing is a Sprint, ‘knock-out style’. The thirty fastest runners from a qualification race in the morning will compete in five consecutive mass-start Quarter-finals, each over the same course. The first two runners from each Quarter-final plus the two overall next best times qualify for the two mass-start Semi-finals with six runners in each. The two fastest from each Semi-final plus the two runners with the next best times run in the mass-start Final. The Semi-finals and the Final will take place around Stockholm Castle and in the narrow streets and alleys of Stockholm Old town.

Day three of the Tour is at Raufoss, near Gjøvik, Norway. Here the format will be a chasing start Middle distance race with winning times 10-15 minutes longer than normal. Start times will be based on time standings from the first two days of the Tour, less bonus seconds based on position achieved in the knock-out Sprint. The first runner to the finish in this race is the overall winner of the Nordic Tour.

World Championships in Norway

This year’s World Championships are to be held at Trondheim, Norway starting on 8th August. This will be the first time since 2004 that the Championships are staged on classic Nordic terrain. The three individual finals – Sprint, Middle and Long distance – count as competitions 7, 8 and 9 in the World Cup programme.

France, then to Switzerland for the Final

Competition 10, a Long distance race, will take place at Annecy in France, close to the venue for the World Championships in 2011. It is a short journey from there to Geneva for the final two races, a Middle distance race and the PostFinance Sprint on successive days.

Prior to the final two races, World Cup standings will be based on the sum of the competitors’ 7 best scores out of the 10 races. The scores from competitions 11 and 12 will then be added to the 7 best scores to give the total scores. Prize money will again be given to the first six overall place-getters, the winning woman and man both receiving 1000 Euros.

Full details of the competition programme, national runners’ quotas and scoring system can be found in the Special Rules for the 2010 World Cup in Orienteering which can be downloaded from the IOF website.